Join our Mailing List

Learn about upcoming screenings and events

Tell-A-Friend

Featured Commentators

Anne BayefskyDirector, Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust

Anne Bayefsky is a human rights scholar and activist. She currently directs the Touro College Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, and a barrister and solicitor, Ontario Bar. Her areas of expertise include international human rights law, equality rights, and constitutional human rights law.

Bayefsky holds a BA, MA and LL.B from the University of Toronto and an M.Litt from Oxford University. She has served as the director of York’s Centre for Refugee Studies; project director for the university's Human Rights Treaty Study; member of Canadian delegations to international meetings, such as the UN Human Rights Commissions 1993-1996, the UN General Assembly in 1984 and 1989, the Vienna World Conference on Human Rights in 1993, and in 1995, a delegate of the American Society of International Law to the Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women.

Currently, she is a member of the International Law Association Committee on International Human Rights Law and Practice; Editor-in-Chief of the series "Refugees and Human Rights", published by Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague; and editor of Eye on the UN. She also sits on the Board of Advisors of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a non-profit think-tank focusing on issues of United States and Israeli national security.

Bayefsky has published extensively in the field of human rights, including a collaborative report with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in 2001. Bayefsky.com, which she created as a gateway to the United Nations’ Human Rights Treaties, aims to enhance “the implementation of the human rights legal standards of the United Nations” on the basis that “accessibility to UN human rights norms by individuals everywhere is fundamental to their successful realization.”